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I walked to Raissa and stood just before her. "Raissa," I cried, "what is the matter?" She made no answer: it was as if she had not heard me. Her face was no paler, nor in any way different, except that it had a stony look and an expression of slight fatigue. "She is cross too," Latkin whispered to me. I took Raissa by the hand. "David is alive." I cried louder than before "alive and unhurt.

But one day it was brought to an abrupt conclusion once for all: my father quarreled irreconcilably with his former associate. If Latkin had snapped a profitable bit of my father's business, as Nastasa did afterward, he would have been no more angry with him than he was with Nastasa, perhaps even less.

My father had for many years been on very friendly, even intimate terms with a retired government clerk called Latkin, a lame little man in poor circumstances with queer, timid manners, one of those creatures of whom it is commonly said that they are crushed by God Himself. Like my father and Nastasey, he was engaged in the humbler class of legal work and acted as legal adviser and agent.

"You know it was with no sort of profit to myself, Porfiry Petrovitch," he faltered: "why, I cut my own throat!" My father remained implacable. Latkin never set foot in our house again. Fate itself seemed determined to carry out my father's last cruel words. How he struggled on, what he lived upon it is hard to imagine. He lived in a dilapidated hovel at no great distance from our house.

Latkin was evidently aware that he was not saying what he meant, and he made every effort to explain matters to me. Raissa, apparently, did not hear what he was saying, and her little sister went on snapping her whip. My head grew confused. "What does it all mean?" I asked of an old woman who was looking out of the window of the house. "What does it mean, sir?" answered she in a sing-song voice.

Then he turned to him, bowed very low so that he touched the floor with one hand, saying, "You forgive me, too, Martinyan Gavrilitch," kissed him on the shoulder. Latkin in response smacked his lips in the air and blinked: I doubt whether he quite knew what he was doing.

But Latkin, under the influence of some unexplained, incomprehensible feeling of envy or greed, and perhaps also moved by a momentary feeling of honesty, had played him false in exposing him to their patron, a rich young merchant, by opening the careless young man's eyes to some sharp practice by which my father expected to make a very pretty sum.

But what are we to do with it?" "Yes! what?" We both stared at the watch and pondered. "Shall we bury it again? Or put it in the stove," I suggested at last. "Or, I tell you what: shouldn't we take it to Latkin?" "No," answered David. "That's not the thing. I know what: they have set up a committee at the governor's office and are collecting subscriptions for the benefit of the people of Kasimov.

"She is cross-eyed, cross-eyed," Latkin muttered in my ear. I took Raissa by the hand. "David is alive," I cried, more loudly than before. "Alive and well; David's alive, do you understand? He was pulled out of the water; he is at home now and told me to say that he will come to you to-morrow; he is alive!"

Besides, it soon was night and all in the house went to rest. The next day David got up as if nothing had happened, and not long afterward, on one and the same day, two important events took place: in the morning died the old Latkin, Raissa's father, and in the evening Jegor, David's father, arrived. Since he had not sent any letter or told any one, he took us all by surprise.